4 Years Later, Scarred but Still Confident

A NEW PRESIDENT President Obama signing an executive order in the Oval Office in January 2009.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — He warned them in 2008, and when he formally opened his re-election campaign in May, he put it in his speech again. He will “never be a perfect president,” he said, a line he now repeats at stop after stop. The unspoken subtext: It’s not my fault if you didn’t listen or expected too much.

If rapturous supporters in Denver four years ago were not paying attention, those expected here on Thursday night surely know better. This is not a perfect president; this is a proud yet humbled president, a confident yet scarred president, a dreamer mugged by reality, a pragmatist confounded by ideology, a radical to some, a sellout to others.

This is a president who has yet to realize the lofty expectations that propelled him from obscurity to the Oval Office, whose idealism or naïveté or hubris has been tempered by four years in the fires. Long after the messiah jokes vanished, the oh-so-mortal Barack Hussein Obama is left to make the case that while progress is slow, he is taking America to a better place — and that he will be a better president over the next four years.

If Denver was all about promise, Charlotte is all about patience. Whether Americans grant the 44th president a four-year extension will depend in part on his ability to reconcile the heady aspirations of 2008 with the messy results of the four years that followed. Remade by his time in office, the candidate of change will now argue for staying the course.

Although “he certainly seems more grizzled or hardened,” as his former economics adviser Austan Goolsbee observed, Mr. Obama expresses confidence that he has figured out how to wield power in an age of political polarization and economic stagnation.

Now on his third chief of staff, he describes his change in management in sports terms, no longer picking the best overall athlete but whoever best fits the particular job. Burned by failed Roosevelt Room summits with Republican leaders and faced with implacable resistance, he has abandoned the inside game to barnstorm the country pressuring lawmakers. Once a virtual prime minister tethered to Congress, he now advances immigration, environmental and education initiatives through executive authority.

In the privacy of the West Wing, of course, there are moments when he feels discouraged by what he has not accomplished or unappreciated for what he has. “That’s been our sweet spot — finding policies that don’t make anybody happy, that make both sides angry,” he has joked, Mr. Goolsbee said. “And the experts then say, well, they didn’t do enough anyway.”

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GULF SPILL Examining oil deposits at a beach in Port Fourchon, La., after the BP explosion in 2010.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

But those close to him say he takes the long view, understands things will not change as quickly as he likes, and retains his famed never-too-high, never-too-low reserve. During the dark days of summer 2011 when a grand bargain with Republicans on spending slipped away, he took a walk with David Axelrod, his strategist, to the White House basketball court and shot hoops.

Mr. Obama looked at him incredulously. “Of course not,” he said. “If you’re in public life, where else would you rather be?”

The Limits of Rationality

A few months ago, Mr. Obama read “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” by Daniel Kahneman, about how people make decisions — quick, instinctive thinking versus slower, contemplative deliberation. For Mr. Obama, a deliberator in an instinctive business, this may be as instructive as any political science text.

Mr. Obama, the 51-year-old Harvard law graduate, sees himself as a rational thinker and came to office with what might be called the Reasonable Person Theory of Government. If he could simply sit down and talk with other political actors, whether they be Republicans from the House or mullahs from Tehran, he seemed certain he could work something out. His faith in his own powers of persuasion was deep.

But politics is often not rational, at least not as Mr. Obama defined it. The Iranians have proved immune to Mr. Obama’s charm, as have the North Koreans, the Taliban and Vladimir V. Putin. So have the Republicans and, for that matter, even some Democrats.

After a year of failed Middle East peacemaking, he conceded being too confident that he could cajole Israelis and Palestinians into resolving age-old disputes. “We overestimated our ability to persuade them to do so when their politics ran contrary to that,” he concluded at the time.

So, too, has his reliance on oratory diminished. At first, there was no problem, it seemed, that could not be solved by a presidential address. “Race problem? Speech,” one former aide recalled. “Afghanistan? Speech.” But speeches by themselves rarely generated the action he sought.

Indeed, Mr. Obama in private sometimes expresses surprise at the constraints of the office. Lulled by his success in passing an $800 billion stimulus package 24 days after his inauguration, and perhaps not fully cognizant of the tone set by doing so almost exclusively with Democratic votes, he found that everything else came harder, like his health care program, or not at all, like climate and immigration legislation.

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OUT OF IRAQ Telling military members at Fort Bragg, N.C., that after almost nine years, the war was over.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

He keeps a list and argues that he has fulfilled most of his core promises. He pulled the country back from the economic abyss, rescued the auto industry, killed the world’s top terrorist, withdrew troops from Iraq, imposed regulations on Wall Street, put two liberal justices on the Supreme Court, signed a nuclear treaty with Russia and cut taxes for the middle class.

Yet looking back, he realizes that some of his “heal the planet” ambitions that would prove fodder for mockery by Mitt Romney, his Republican rival, were unrealistic, at least in four years. During the 2008 campaign, he said he would talk with rogue leaders from countries including Iran and Cuba, make peace between Pakistan and India so Pakistan could shift forces to the Afghan border, close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, win Senate approval of a never-ratified test ban treaty, negotiate legislation live on C-Span and usher in a new era of bipartisanship.

His contemplative decision-making can be isolating. He does not readily let others in. “It’s hard to gain the president’s confidence — not trust, but confidence in your judgment,” Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. observed in an interview this summer. “It doesn’t come easily to this president.” As a result, he said, Mr. Obama demands a rigorous process. When someone proposes something, the president’s reaction is, “Get me a paper on that.” When he receives it, Mr. Biden said, “he devours it. He masters it.”

His deliberation proved refreshing to those weary of President George W. Bush’s swagger. “I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak,” Mr. Obama once said when asked why it took him days to respond to a controversy.

But when he waited to speak out about the would-be underwear bomber at Christmas 2009 or the BPoil spill in 2010, he paid a political price. He learned the public wants to see its president during crises. So when a gunman shot up a movie theater in Colorado this summer, Mr. Obama appeared before cameras within hours.

As Mr. Kahneman said in an interview, “Being a slow thinker for a leader is not necessarily an advantage because the public likes a leader to think quickly and react instinctively.”

Hardball Time

How has Mr. Obama applied the lessons he learned? One day last spring, aides told him interest rates on federal student loans would double on July 1 unless Congress acted. Early on in his presidency, Mr. Obama might have invited lawmakers to the White House.

Instead, he headed to Air Force One and flew to college campuses in North Carolina and Colorado to castigate Congress for not heading off the rate hike. There was never any debate about the strategy; no one, even Mr. Obama, thought about talking with Republicans.

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HEALTH LAW DEBATE The scene at the Supreme Court as justices heard arguments in the landmark case.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

“Our view on student loans was they wouldn’t do it without really putting their backs against the wall,” said David Plouffe, the president’s senior adviser. “He realized this was a simple thing, it was clear, it was something we could motivate people on.”

Republicans angrily accused the president of bad faith. “He was making a political argument,” said Representative John Kline of Minnesota, chairman of the education committee. “I never saw any engagement from the White House about what really to do about it.”

Maybe so, but Obama aides crowed that it worked because Republicans instantly came out against the rate increase, too. Republicans said they saw it the other way, arguing that they defused the Obama attack by reacting quickly. Either way, it was a sign of how much the president had changed.

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No longer would he give Republicans the benefit of the doubt. Having been surprised by the unbreakable solidarity against his initiatives, Mr. Obama came to privately use the phrase “not on the level,” meaning Republicans were not playing straight. “They came in like they were the East German judge at the Olympics,” said Mr. Goolsbee. “He could hit the triple flip and they would give him a 2. That was a pretty grim lesson that he had to learn.”

In Mr. Obama’s mind, it is a one-way street, and he takes no responsibility for the divisions, dismissing Republicans who consider him highhanded. “Elections have consequences,” he told Representative Eric Cantor, the Republican whip at the time, during an early meeting, “and Eric, I won.”

The breakdown of last year’s grand bargain talks proved a turning point. “That was a searing experience,” Mr. Plouffe recalled. The lesson: Forget negotiations and use the bully pulpit. Policy is not about applying reason; it’s about applying power.

“You’re never going to convince them by sitting around the table and talk about what’s good for the country,” said John D. Podesta, who ran Mr. Obama’s transition and still advises him occasionally. “You had to demonstrate that there’s political pain if you don’t produce an acceptable outcome.”

Bold and Cautious

If Mr. Obama has changed over his presidency, in part it suggests Americans never really knew him to begin with. Where conservatives see an unremitting liberal, supporters on the left wish he were. To mystified admirers, it is unrequited love. When they read in David Maraniss’s biography of how a girlfriend told him, “I love you,” only to have him reply, “Thank you,” some joked they knew how she felt.

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AN END IN AFGHANISTAN Meeting in Kabul with President Hamid Karzai to discuss a troop withdrawal.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

On the hustings, Mr. Obama is more careful to reply in kind. When someone shouts out, “We love you,” he calls out, “I love you back.” But sometimes it does not feel that way. His has become a bloodless presidency, built on cold calculations, not quixotic crusades. His argument now boils down to asking voters to stick with him because the other side will revive failed policies that would enrich the wealthy, shred safety-net programs and undermine the economy.

With unemployment stuck above 8 percent and his approval ratings stuck below 50 percent, Mr. Obama has turned to the sort of campaigning he once disdained. The man who bristled when critics claimed without evidence that he was born in Kenya or was a Muslim now does not object as advisers and allies make unsubstantiated assertions about Mr. Romney’s taxes and business record.

Asked about such incidents, he says the behavior of the Republicans is worse. He does not talk about changing Washington rules; he is playing by the rules as he found them.

He is sensitive to the costs he has imposed on his own party. After the Supreme Court upheld his health care program, he reached out to three House Democrats who lost in 2010 after supporting the legislation, including Tom Perriello of Virginia, who said liberals have come around. “To the extent there was a passion for Obama in 2008, that’s matured into a comfort and a trust by 2012,” he said.

Mr. Obama is a curious mixture of bold and cautious. He spent months in what amounted to a grueling graduate seminar on Afghanistan and then disregarded his vice president and top advisers to order 30,000 more troops to the war zone. Even the action considered his most decisive, ordering the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, took place only after months of secretly monitoring intelligence and considering options.

He defied advisers by pressing for his expansive health care program rather than settling for a “skinny” alternative. Yet he stays doggedly away from hot-button issues like gun control and race, took two years to lift the ban on gays and lesbians in the military, and took even longer to endorse same-sex marriage. He appointed a bipartisan commission to fix the nation’s finances, then shelved its plan.

On foreign policy as well, he has his priorities, and those that do not fit are put to the side. Since pulling American forces out of Iraq, for example, he has seemed removed from its fate. Adm. Dennis C. Blair, Mr. Obama’s director of national intelligence until he was pushed out over policy and personality differences, said the president took a checklist approach to foreign policy overly influenced by domestic politics.

“There quickly developed what I thought of as the top-10 list of individual issues that needed to be worked — Iran, a treaty with Russia, the South China Sea, the Middle East peace process,” he said. “Never did there seem to be an idea of a strategy — where do we want to be, what’s important, and how do we get there?”

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STRIKING BACK Announcing at the White House that American forces had killed Osama bin Laden.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

Moreover, he said, decisions on foreign policy were shadowed by concern for how they would play with the American public. “Domestic political considerations were ground in very early, very early,” he said.

A Second Term

The isolation can be palpable. Riding in his motorcade after an event, Mr. Obama sometimes stares out the windows at the world he cannot really touch. When he arrives at a hotel at the end of a campaign day, he confers with aides in his suite, then sometimes asks what they plan to do the rest of the evening. When they mention going to the hotel bar to unwind, he notes he is not free to follow, essentially confined in his suite until morning.

“He was a little wistful when I was with him about his new public life, his presidential life, and its cost in terms of isolation from ordinary life experiences,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, his former Illinois colleague.

Mr. Obama enjoys watching “Homeland” and “Boardwalk Empire,” and recently took in the Will Ferrell movie “The Campaign” (not great, in his review, but some funny scenes). His fixation with ESPN remains unabated, and, like others in Washington, he ruminates on the wisdom of the Nationals’ sitting down their star pitcher, Stephen Strasburg, before the playoffs.

But his inner circle is the same tight group it was before. It is probably fair to say he has made no new friends since moving to Washington. “The times he wants downtime or personal time, he seems to naturally gravitate to the people he’s known for a very long time,” said John W. Rogers Jr., an old friend.

In private, he speaks of his challenger with disdain. While intellectually understanding the odds, aides say, the president finds it hard to conceive of losing to Mr. Romney, a rival he does not consider a serious thinker who knows what he wants to do with the country. The president has told people he is determined to win because he believes the economy will bounce back and does not want Mr. Romney getting credit.

Mr. Obama has convinced himself, or so he says, that things will be different next time around. Should he win, maybe Republicans will finally cooperate.

“I believe that if we’re successful in this election — when we’re successful in this election — that the fever may break,” he said last spring. “My expectation is that after the election, now that it turns out the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again.”

If that sounds like optimism overcoming experience, Mr. Obama promises to be on guard. “I’m not going to just play it safe,” he tells aides. But he intends to play by the lessons he has learned.

A version of this article appears in print on September 6, 2012, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: 4 Years Later, Scarred but Still Confident. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe